Mewgenics is the latest roguelike from The Binding of Isaac creators, and it's just as chaotic, cursed, and cantankerous as you’d expect – and I just can’t put it down

It’s finally here; after a tumultuous few years of will-they-won’t-they development, Edmund McMillen (The Binding of Isaac’s creator) and his frequent collaborator Tyler Glaiel (for The End is Nigh and Aether) are finally ready to share their latest creation – Mewgenics.

Mewgenics is a game that does exactly what it says on the tin – its core mechanic is selective cat breeding – but if you’re looking for a life simulator, that it is not. Instead, you’ll march your army of superpowered pussycats through harsh battlefields (read: sewers, junkyards, and other such dismal settings), fight your way through turn-based encounters against grotesque foes, and develop winning formulas that will eventually lead your feline friends to victory.

It’s a surprisingly compelling and complex game, offering ample collectible items, a healthy number of achievements, and plenty of replayability. If you spent the 2010s haunting the virtual halls of Newgrounds or playing titles like The Binding of Isaac and Super Meat Boy, you’ll feel the warm embrace of nostalgia, but you won’t get bored quickly thanks to the creative ways Mewgenics plays with the roguelite formula. It’s unforgiving, in places, and won’t always let you take the easy route, but it’s great fun the whole way through.

That same strength could be a weakness for some players; the raunchy humor, slightly monstrous art style, and energetic dialogue might register as dated to some. Stripped away from its tone, however, the game still stands as a thoroughly enjoyable, well-paced, and amply versatile addition to your Steam library. Plus, it’s Steam Deck compatible, where it feels right at home.

No purr-lace like home

Welcome to Boon County, where the cats are cute, the real estate market is booming, and both of those statements are only half true. In this rundown part of town lies your humble home, a shack-like property inhabited by your collection of cats. From these modest beginnings shall spring forth legend, however, because it’s here you’ll collect, breed, and care for a cat army.

That means ensuring there’s enough food, cleaning up their waste (and, er... corpses, occasionally), decorating your home, and shopping for both supplies and in-level items. You can also prune the genetic pool by shipping off cats to allies you’ll meet along the way to unlock various features and perks, so from the get-go, there’s plenty of macro management to dig your teeth into.

Along that vein, it’s important not to underestimate the importance of this hub; even in the early game, the cats you keep around shape the outcomes of the battles to come, whether that’s due to the mutations and stats they carry or because they have a penchant for infighting and can leave permanent injuries on one another.

When you’ve had your fill of cat care and it’s time to end the day, your cats can choose to fight each other or mate, leaving you with new messes to clean up. Later in the game, it’s possible to steer these interactions a little more by seconding your cats in groups as you gain new rooms for your shack. I had great fun selectively breeding in some mutations that I found especially cute, even if they did come at the detriment of some of my cats; I can’t help it, their goofy little snaggle teeth are irresistible.

New strays will also arrive each day, offering an easy way to fill out your party when you’re low on soldiers, or the gene pool is getting too slim. Over time, though, stockpiles will run low, and at that point, you can venture out with four cats of your choice to battle foes and bring home vital supplies like food and money; and here’s where the meat of the game begins.

I can’t fight this feline anymore

Upon selecting your chosen warriors, you’ll be able to assign them to one of four classes to begin with; this increases to more than 12 over time, each with unique abilities and passives that you’ll curate over the course of your travels; those, too, can be passed on to descendants. There are over 1,200 abilities and passive traits in the game, so no two runs will play the same – this variation made the game pretty hard to put down.

There are seven stats each cat will come pre-loaded with: strength (melee and damage), dexterity (range and damage), constitution (HP and regeneration), intelligence (mana regeneration), speed (initiative and movement), charisma (max mana), and luck (chance-based events like critical rolls).

Based on these, certain classes will align better with different cats, but the further you get in the game, and the more chaotic your approach to breeding has been, the more often you’ll find yourself with some pretty busted combinations.

I managed to score a necromancer carrying many cleric traits, loaded it up with a bunch of perks for healing, and created the most monstrously good wham-bulance (high damage, high heal) since I discovered the Soraka/Yuumi bottom lane combination in League of Legends. A niche reference point, but if you know, you know.

After equipping any items you may have to boost stats and grant new abilities to your kitties, it’s time to head out on the road, where you’ll face enemies ranging from zombie kitties to strange psychic eldritch beasts, tom cats to bomb-lobbing mousers, and beyond in randomized battle encounters.

There’s a fantastic range of enemies to fight (over 200), each with their own abilities and behaviours; a personal favorite is a pair of giant shark cats, which I realised all too late can devour your brave soldiers in one bite – and there’s no coming back from this particular death.

Outside of perma-death situations (which there are quite a few of!), enemies will down your teammates, and their fainted bodies can take damage three times before exploding into chunks of bone and meat.

This is more than just an inconvenience in-fight; each time one of your cats becomes downed, it will pick up conditions like injuries and jinxes. Sure, they’ll heal up a little at the end of combat, but these injuries limit their stats for the rest of the run, and items or abilities that cure these conditions are few and far between.

Speaking of which, in between battles, you’ll pick up various items (of which there are over 900) and face different encounters. In these encounters, a random party member will choose from different stat-based options, and, based on your stat points, a probability-based outcome decides if the interaction helps or hinders your crew.

The luck element of the game is often cruel, and there’s no room for sentimentality with your party; your front-line soldiers will die sometimes, and when that happens, you run the risk of losing everything you gained in the process.

A game that keeps on giving

There are multiple pathways to travel, starting with the Alley and branching off to the Sewer and Graveyard. These lead on to the Caves and the Junkyard, respectively, and that’s just in the first act. Later, you’ll unlock more roads to travel with their own challenges. For example, in the Desert, the extreme heat leads to health loss over time unless you keep your cats cool and watered.

Survive a run, and you’ll be able to take your newly buffed up cats back home, where they’ll retire (likely into your selective breeding programme) and no longer be able to go out on battles – with a few exceptions.

All the above is basically just a precursor to the game in its entirety; I’ve played a solid 30 hours, and I’m still only 20% of the way through. There’s a reported over 200 hours of gameplay, so I’ve no concerns about tiring too quickly of Mewgenics. I’d assume that’s before you factor in unlockable achievements, too, meaning much like The Binding of Isaac, I expect superfans to see hours well into the thousands worth of kitty cat combat.

It helps that the game has excellent music, consistently great art, and some really well-designed levels. Some of the boss fight song lyrics had me chuckling even as my ill-fated kitties erupted into a spray of body parts and blood, and the rest of the soundtrack has enough pace and variation to keep me locked in to the addictive gameplay loop.

Every time I’ve sat down to play, I’ve unlocked some fresh hell for my cats to endure – one of the latest is a monstrous doomsday cat called Guillotina, who turns up at my cats’ home every week or so to fight retired cats.

The chaos is almost certain to continue amplifying as I delve further into the world of these calamitous kitties, and while I don’t know if it will have such a broad appeal as the comparatively simple The Binding of Isaac, I hope long-time fans of it and other creative roguelikes in the genre will give it its due. I certainly intend to!

Should you play Mewgenics?

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Accessibility features

Mewgenics is hit-or-miss with accessibility; there are no subtitle adjustments, difficulty adjustments or colorblind settings, but text boxes are pretty large by default and you can change the size of UI elements like the status bar, tooltip size and adjust the noise and grain and flicker levels. The controls are mappable, too. Some more work could be done here; a clearer font and colorblind settings wouldn’t go amiss, but hopefully that’s something we see in a later update.

How I reviewed Mewgenics

I spent over 30 hours in Mewgenics, covering the first act and most of the second as well as some side quests; enough to get a good sense of the gameplay, though I’m sure there’s plenty still to come as the game goes on.

I played on both my gaming laptop (Dell’s Alienware M16 R1) and my Steam Deck paired with my Corsair Void v2 MAX Wireless gaming headset, and it played wonderfully on both.

First reviewed January-February 2026